so I ask once more… what is our meaning/purpose?
we can help discover that by means of a spiritual autobiography…
help find it, not necessarily will we find it, but it might help find it…
it is in the recognition of the human condition that will help us to
understand what it means to be human……
we are born… tabula rasa… blank slates…
and society and the family fill that blank slate with
the ism’s and ideologies of the state, the church, the culture,
the media, with schooling/education is simply being educated into
that society’s ism and ideologies…
we are filled with ism’s like nationalism and patriotism
and Catholicism and Hinduism’s and Christianity and
capitalism and obedience to authority which I guess is called
Authoritism….and obedience to all the other ism’s and ideologies
that a society tries to indoctrinate its citizens with…….
then at some point in time, we become aware of the indoctrinations…
we become aware that our belief in nation and state and religions has been
taught into us, indoctrinated into us… and so we begin, if we are so lucky,
to examine our beliefs and our indoctrinations… that usual begins around
our teen years and can last for a long, long time……
if we are unable to begin the process of an examination of our lives, then
we become like IQ45 and blindly accept everything that we were indoctrinated
with as children……
but we can become aware and alive to our other possibilities and thus
we can begin to examine the other possibilities that exists out there……
we are… being and by examination… we can become…
I was raised moderate democrat… and by examination and by
events, I was radicalized… to the point of becoming an anarchist…
where I was for many years… this is politically… and I was by examination,
also changed philosophically to the several strands of philosophy that I
moved from and into as the years passed…
my adults years have been changes from one possibility to another,
from anarchism to communism to democrat to liberal…
and my philosophical possibilities also changed from Nietzschean to
a follower of Hume to a follower of Kant to existentialism to Kierkegaard
to today… where I don’t follow anyone anymore… I simply express my
own values and views as I see them philosophically……
I have grown and become something more as the years and my experience
has changed… I have gone from being to becoming…
and I still am becoming…what I don’t know… but my process hasn’t
stopped, at least not yet…
I still seek meaning/purpose in my life…
and I still have a fragmented soul……
and I still don’t quite understand what it means
to be human, fully human………
my journey to becoming is still going on…
one possibility for me is an ongoing spiritual autobiography that
I write for me and me alone… as I am writing today and have for all these
years…and hopefully for years more to come…
I have become aware of the loss of possibilities that has occurred in
my life… but I seek other possibilities that might replace those
lost possibilities…
I seek to obey the Socratic oath which is to examine my life
and the life I lead and in doing so, become aware of who I am…
I can, as another possibility, become more moral…….
but what does being moral… being… being moral actually mean?
I can engage in aesthetics or work on my life as art…
or I can engage in my life existentially where I see my
life in terms of existentialism…….
I have possibilities…but I must seek them out…
I cannot be passive in my search for those possibilities…
I can also seek out my meaning… purpose in terms of the values
I decide to pursue… such as finding my meaning/purpose in terms
of the values I decide to pursue… such as pursing values like justice,
love, hope, charity, peace, honesty……. I can find meaning and purpose
in my engagement with the values that I pursue…
I can make justice my reason for being… I can exist to
follow and create justice at every chance I get…
I can make justice, as a value, my reason for being and my reason
for existence…meaning/purpose……
that is the point of values… they give life its meaning/purpose…
I can live for and die for my higher values of existence…
they make life worth living……
and that is how we reunite our divided and broken souls……
we reexamine life and conclude that we can reunite our souls under
the banner of justice or of love or of charity…….
we can become our values…… and that possibility becomes our
meaning/purpose……
and so in making justice, as my value, I create a new possibility for
Kropotkin to exist… when all other possibilities slowly go away,
I can create a new possibility for me… by being… just……
being… becoming… that is the path of life…
Kropotkin